The Handbook and Analysis of Ancient Ritual Signs Project

Day 2 – January 3, 2017

Today I handled several tricky sources. The first problem was: At which point is it reasonable to classify two similar signs differently? The second: If Greek letters are distributed among charaktêres, do you classify these as charaktêres or as letters? The third: If the inscription is clearly labeled as „charaktêres“ but includes a sequence of Greek letters which could be reconstructed as a Greek word (and previous editors categorized the Greek letters as magic signs), do you classify these letters as charaktêres or as letters? And the fourth problem, which will be present regularly during the next year: How to deal with partly destroyed or not clearly legible signs?

I have added a category „Difficulties“ in which I show the individual sources to illustrate the problems and open them for discussion.

I worked with PGM VII / P. London 121 today. The British Museum does not provide any online images nor information about the papyrus, and searching the database is very uncomfortable. Working with it is the opposite of the Berlin Papyrus Database I talked about yesterday. By the way, Trisgemistos states erroneously that PGM VII is kept in the British Library. P. Lond. 46 and 122 are kept there, images are provided online by the library.

But PGM VII is published in very good colour facsimiles by Kenyon (Greek Papyri in the British Museum, Catalogue with texts 1, 1893, 83-115, Facsimiles plate 51-65.) of which I have a copy, fortunately. I have not found a digitized version of the facsimiles, but the text edition is available at archive.org. You also get Wessely there (Neue griechische Zauberpapyri, in: Denkschr.d. kaiserl. Akad.d. Wiss., Philosoph.-Hist.Kl. 42,2, Wien 1893, 1-96), including an extensive glossar.